PLEY, John (1608-85), of Dartmouth, Devon.

John Pley’s father was a citizen of Exeter, probably of a family with roots in the Lyme Regis area. A branch of the family remained rooted in Dorset: George Pley, a kinsman of the Devon branch, was to be active in the service of governments of the 1650s.9CJ vii. 756a. John Pley senior was a merchant, who had been apprenticed to Richard Bevys, whose mayoralty of Exeter was cut short by his own death in 1602. John Pley became a freeman around 1601, and lived in the parish of St Olave, Exeter, where in 1602 he paid subsidy on goods valued at £3 annually. A wealthier neighbour there was Richard Dorchester, whose goods were valued at twice those of Pley.10Exeter Freemen, 109; W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (2nd ed. 1975), 288; Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 4, 5. Dorchester was mayor of Exeter in 1606, and Pley looked up to him, as it was Pley senior’s express wish that he should be buried in the cathedral churchyard at Exeter, as close as possible to the grave of Dorchester. In 1605, Pley senior married Elizabeth Newcombe, daughter of another Exeter merchant, William Newcombe of All Hallows, Goldsmith Street (mayor in 1612). John Pley seems to have been their only child, and was baptised in his mother’s parish of All Hallows. Pley senior believed himself to be one of God’s ‘elected children’, and was ‘without doubt’ that he was destined for heaven on his death, which occurred no later than April 1610, when his son was less than two years old. 11PROB11/115/332; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 288; Regs... of the City of Exeter, 3. His legacy for a lecturer at the cathedral, or a hospital, payable only on the death of his wife and son, hints at a pious man with civic aspirations, but a businessman of strictly limited means.

After his father’s death, John Pley would have been subject to the jurisdiction of the Exeter court of orphans, as the son of a freeman of the city. His life under this regime would probably have meant an education in his native city and an apprenticeship there. Unfortunately, the next 30 years of Pley’s life are a mystery. He probably left Exeter to work in commerce elsewhere, but cannot be traced in the plentiful returns sent from Devon to Parliament in 1642 of those who took its Protestation. The first reliable source for his whereabouts as an adult is a deposition made at the exchequer after 1660, when Nicholas Field, a receiver of taxes and levies for Parliament’s standing committee in Devon, reported that in February 1646 he had paid over £1,000 to ‘Mr John Ply’ of Kingsbridge.12E113/6, answer of Nicholas Field. This strongly implies that Pley was at this point working as receiver-general of the county. He was clearly making a living as a merchant, which gave him the necessary creditworthiness to be an effective receiver-general, and in February 1650 petitioned the government of the Commonwealth, requesting letters of marque, which would enable him to license privateers against pirates or other threats to his shipping interests. His case was referred to the admiralty judges.13CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 501.

Whether Pley was still at Kingsbridge when he petitioned in 1650 is not clear, but he appears not in that town but in nearby Dartmouth in January 1653, as a prominent signatory of a petition by the merchants and inhabitants of Dartmouth. They requested a convoy for 30 ships bound for Newfoundland, the fishing fleet which they financed and operated, as protection against marauding enemy men-of-war, by which they probably meant at this date the Dutch. 14SP18/32/44. This is the earliest indication that Pley had moved to Dartmouth, but he seems not to have been a member of the civic corporation there. In April 1654 Pley married Rebecca Maynard, the daughter of the Totnes merchant Christopher Maynard*, who had served in various offices in that town before becoming mayor in 1648. This gave him some standing in the town, which can only have been enhanced by Maynard’s brief service for the borough in the 1656 Parliament. In August 1654, as ‘John Plea of Dartmouth’, he was made a commissioner for ejecting scandalous ministers in Devon and Exeter, a token of his being recognized by the government as a godly figure.

Soon after his marriage, and certainly by September 1655, he had begun to work closely with Henry Hatsell* as a navy agent, officially with the office of deputy vice-admiral of the coast, and with the rank of captain. Like Hatsell, Pley was active in all aspects of servicing the naval presence, in Pley’s case on the south Devon coast. During 1655 and 1656, among Pley’s many duties as vice-admiral, he supervised repairs to a ship brought to Brixham as a prize; examined the masters of suspect ships; supervised impressment of men at Dartmouth for the navy; passed on intelligence about shipping movements and disposed of derelict ships and their cargoes.15CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 324, 541; 1655-6, pp. 53, 157, 208, 284, 491, 532. He worked in procurement, reaching deals between suppliers and the government on stores materials such as canvas, in which he himself enjoyed a cut.16CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 494.

In all this, he was Hatsell’s right-hand man, and it is clear that he and John Clerke II* made up an effective troika working in the naval interest in the south west. The background was of course the security emergency of the mid-1650s, to which the protectorate government had responded with the imposition of the major-generals. As part of the security system, Pley acted as an informant to Secretary John Thurloe*, on matters of domestic policing.17CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 88; TSP iv. 571. Pley also proved an assiduous intelligence-gatherer on various individuals from other countries who disembarked in the Dartmouth district, and in this capacity, Pley worked closely with the mayor of Dartmouth. The pair took oaths from priests, searched ships and provided information to the protector’s council.18CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 208; 1656-7, p. 419; TSP v. 358. By means of this work as naval agent, and through his own standing as an adventurer in the Newfoundland fisheries, Pley enjoyed some influence in Dartmouth, although in December 1656 he reported to John Clerke II that he had been unable to persuade his mercantile colleagues to oblige the government on a matter of supply.19CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 483. In March 1657, his position as naval agent in Dartmouth did not inhibit him from signing in a prominent place another petition from the merchants, ship-owners and inhabitants of the seaport, on the threat by Spanish men-of-war to Newfoundland English shipping, to the lord protector. As this petition could only be construed as helpful to those in London promoting the war against Spain, Pley might have seen this activity as merely an extension of his work as a government agent.20SP18/154/50.

In 1659 Pley was returned to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament as burgess for Totnes, where he was doubtless helped along by his being son-in-law of Christopher Maynard. Pley’s fellow-burgess was Gilbert Eveleigh, a friend of Maynard’s. There seems little doubt that Pley’s candidature was made credible by his office as naval agent or deputy vice-admiral, and that his relationship with Maynard was a helpful recommendation rather than a qualification. Hatsell, Clerke and Robert Thomson were others returned on the government naval interest in the south west. ‘Captain’ Pley was named to one committee (11 Apr. 1659), on a petition by George Coney about lands he had bought in the west of England from the trustees for sale of delinquents’ estates, confiscated from the marquess of Winchester.21CJ vii. 634b. This appears to have been the sum of his committee work, and the diarists recorded no speeches by him.

After the closure of this Parliament and the collapse of the Cromwellian protectorate, Pley transferred his allegiance, seemingly without demur, to successor regimes. He accepted a commission to raise 200 volunteers in Dartmouth at the time of the rising by Sir George Boothe*, but he lost all office in 1660. In November that year, he was the object of informers seeking to recover state money alleged to be in his hands, but nothing came of it. His trial in Dartmouth in October 1660 before the mayor’s court for trespass, when a jury found against him, was quite possibly politically motivated: he and Thomas Boone* were censured by the town government the same year for neglects.22Devon RO, DD 62923; DD 63020. In 1662 he sold property in Cornworthy, another parish in the Dartmouth region. Pley was remembered in the will of his father-in-law in 1667, when he still lived in Dartmouth.23PROB11/330/133. The will of Pley’s only son was proved in 1679, although the text is now lost.24Dartmouth St Petrox par. reg.; Exeter Wills (British Rec. Soc. Index Lib. xxxv), 145. Pley himself died in January 1685, and none of his descendants is known to have sat in any Parliaments.